Databricks Inc. today announced it’s expanding its marketplace to include lakehouse applications and artificial intelligence models.

Databricks said the expansion of the marketplace is significant because customers increasingly are running full-fledged applications on top of its Lakehouse Platform and want to expand into building AI models as well. Previously, the marketplace was limited to data sets and data-based products.

“We are in the midst of an AI revolution that has come out of generative AI and folks are trying to find not just data for their AI efforts, but also models themselves,” said Marketing Vice President Joel Minnick, “so the marketplace won’t just be a place where I can acquire data and data products, but also now data applications as well.” The company didn’t say how many applications will be available at launch.

Applications in the Databricks marketplace can run directly on a customer’s instance or on Databricks-managed infrastructure with single sign-on. Data never leaves the customer’s account, which improves security.

Simplifying sales

Databricks also intends to smooth the path to sales for third-party companies by taking on some of the heavy liftings of legal and contract work, Minnick said. For startups in particular, “one of the tricky things is how to onboard customers,” he said. “They don’t necessarily have the staff to go through security and legal and commercial agreements at the scale that they need and it can be hard to connect securely to customer data.”

Marketplace sellers “will be able to inherit all the legal agreements and protections that come with Databricks and the apps will deploy right into the customer’s tenant,” Minnick said. Databricks won’t negotiate license indemnification terms, which are specific to the provider, but it will help define “the specifics of how these relationships work,” he said. “We are still working with our partner community on what those details will look like and that’s not something we’re necessarily ready to roll out just yet.”

Databricks is also expanding the number of partners that use Delta Sharing, its open-source technology for securely sharing live data from lakehouses to other computing platforms. It said Cloudflare Inc., Dell Technologies Inc., Oracle Corp. and Twilio Inc. have committed to sharing data between their platforms and others that support Delta Sharing.

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